Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror/ Our Father

Yesterday, I saw two documentaries, and both left me with many thoughts that I feel the need to write about. The two had one thing in common, crimes against women. For some time, I had a hard time with the topic of feminism. Transmen get heavily judged when fighting for women’s rights, reasoning that we have ‘rejected’ our biological gender. I don’t know about anyone else, but I felt the disconnect with my body even when I don’t have a meaning for it.

As a teen, like most people that grew up with the internet, we weren’t aware of the danger we could find ourselves in by sending photos of our bodies. In Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror, we see and learn about this modern cybercrime. It only took one click, and young girls became trapped and enslaved in real life. What worries me even more, is if there weren’t a whistleblower who went to the media, everything would have stayed hidden.

The other documentary I watched was Our Father. It all started with Dr Cline, who was a fertility specialist. In the 80s, couples who had difficulty conceiving went to him for help. He was supposed to be injecting the husband or a donor’s sperm into the woman so that they could get pregnant. The issue started when, in 2014, Jacoba Ballard took a DNA test to see if she could find any half-siblings.

She found that she basically had a new family tree she didn’t know about, to her surprise and horror. After doing some more research, the half-siblings found they had one thing in common. Their parents have all been patients of doctor Cline. What happened was that instead of inseminating with their husbands or donor sperm, he used his own sample unknowingly to anyone.

In my opinion, this should be a case of rape since he was using the woman’s body in ways she didn’t consent for. However, the law is still in the grey areas on the subject, and this means that Dr Cline was never charged in this case. By the end of the documentary production, 94 siblings had been found, and the families involved think there are more out there.

Alex